Information systems are deployed by businesses to improve workflow and organizational efficiencies. Historically such information systems are designed to make it easy for the service providers such as hospitals, financial institutions or insurers to manage the services they provide. In these prior art service delivery models, Information systems are built and paid for by the organization for the benefit of the organization. The organizations' employees or staffs are the primary users of such systems. These systems are designed with input from such users with the focus being to improve their user experience and operational efficiencies. While the customer or consumer (hereafter “consumer” is understood to include customer, patient and other “users”) is the beneficiary of such organizational services, the information technology platforms are not primarily designed for the consumer but are designed for the benefit of the organizational employees.
As such information systems have evolved, the organizations have decided to allow the consumers to access some of the information stored in the system. The organization may add services or modules to the system to grant the consumer access to some of the features of the service. These features have grown over time into what is known as self-service delivery of capabilities for the consumers. This is where the consumers begin performing some of the functions, like setting up an appointment, updating personal information like mailing address, or reviewing a bill or making a payment, using the system. Here the consumer is taking the role of an employee to do what an employee was doing with the system to manage a small part of data for his/her own data.
In case of financial systems, this delivery model is seen in online banking services where “consumers” are given self-service capabilities. In healthcare, this model is seen in the Personal Health Record (PHR) and/or Patient Portal module available with some hospitals or practice management systems as an extension of the Electronic Health Record initiatives. Over time, these information systems have performed their intended function of serving the employees and organization well. They help them deliver medical care or other services they provide to their “consumers”, patients or customers. They have also made good progress in the areas of self-service for consumers. However, as such organizations deploy and control their own systems, they also retain control and ownership of underlying data and analytics from such data. The customer is required to re-register and re-enter data at each organization to open an account at the institution or to enter as a patient at a facility. The organization may have good business and security reasons to safe guard the data and limit sharing of such information within and outside of the organization. However, sharing of such data across organizations has many benefits for the consumers. These benefits are not achieved when such systems are not inter-operable by design and by choice.
Recognizing these limitations and opportunities, the financial industry tried to develop data exchange standards like Open Financial Exchange—OFX. This standard has evolved over time and it is used by the industry. It does provide some degree of inter-operability with data transfer among the financial institutions. However it has seen limited adoption with limited data transfer control by end-users. Also, for example only, there are no methods for transferring initial account setup information from one institution to another.
The healthcare industry has its own history with Health Level 7 (HL7) and its members that provide a framework and related standards for the exchange, integration, sharing, and retrieval of electronic health information. While HL7 is used by various technology providers in the industry, interoperability among service providers and platforms remains very illusive. Some of the healthcare participants, including government organizations, are spending hundreds of millions of dollars to build information exchanges to share patient data across multiple organizations and various systems within an organization. Such sharing via exchanges has seen limited if any success. There is no accepted standard based practice of sharing data and registering a patient among EHR platforms, hospital management systems (HMS), practice management systems (PMS) and healthcare providers. A patient has to re-register at each facility at each visit to receive service from the provider with various levels of personal information and medical history required to be updated.
In all these attempts at sharing of the data, the focus has remained on the data that an organization collects and what the organization wishes to achieve in terms of delivery of service and benefit to its own business. What data the organization is willing and able to share remains in its control. Such sharing of data, if any, is not designed for the direct benefit of the patients, for example only and not by way of limitation. The patients remain as secondary beneficiaries of such investments in information technologies by the organizations. There is inherent conflict in such system design between patient interests in data and institutional interest in such data. With latest technology, availability of networks and growing understanding and interest by the consumers and patients, it is now possible to change the dynamics of information system model and data ownership and sharing. The following sections describe a process and method to solve this problem and put the patient or consumer in control of information while improving organizational efficiencies and reducing data entry errors. For the first time Applicants' invention makes it possible for a patient and/or consumer to open communication with healthcare providers and other organizations as real-time data sharing becomes available.
With availability of thousands of health related apps for smart phones, consumers are getting unprecedented tools in their hands to keep track of their fitness activities such as exercise and monitoring of calories consumed and more. Personal monitoring devices such as fall detection are increasingly deployed as patient population ages as well as more tech savvy users become users of medical services. However, the limitations of the medical service delivery platforms that are described above only become more pronounced when patient monitoring is recommended or otherwise available for monitoring vital physiological and disease status frequently. Consumer focused platforms like Microsoft Health Vault or Google Health offer patients a place to store personal information made available to them by certain EHR platforms and fitness devices that support their exchange protocol, but the consumer becomes an island of her own information. There is presently no available platform or solution for a patient to communicate effectively with their healthcare providers, for example only, with such information. Similarly, financial industry platforms like Mint or Quicken offer a place for a consumer to aggregate financial data in one place with no effective means to share that data when opening a new account at a new institution.
The Patient Centric Platform
The present disclosure addresses the above problems by describing a platform in a designated computer system developed for the benefit of the patient that changes the dynamics of system design and delivery of information technology for healthcare industry, again for example only and not by way of limitation. One objective of the present disclosure is to provide a method for a patient to interface with healthcare providers using personal computers, tablets and smart phones, for example.
According to this invention, for the first time, the patients are in charge of their own data, both from a data entry point of view as well as for management and use of this data. The patients are not required to ‘sign-up’, ‘register’ or ‘open an account’ manually at each healthcare provider facility each time they wish to receive service from them. According to the present invention, all patient data—both static and dynamic—is entered and/or collected in a patient managed platform that stores all the relevant information needed for the patient to acquire services from any healthcare institution.
Once a patient has created such a data repository, she can update it any time as needed and share the latest information and/or history with any one she chooses at any time. The recipient organization or person can continue to use the platform they may have invested in per the traditional model and simply ‘take’ or ‘accept’ the information authorized to be provided by the patient by means of the present invention to improve the quality of data in their own systems.
This disclosure further describes methods for various processes involved in establishing such service for the benefit of a patient and her healthcare services providers. As described more fully hereafter, it will be seen that this same approach works equally well in many other settings for consumers in dealing with other service providers such as financial institutions, insurance services, retail or online stores or educational and governmental institutions.
The present invention further addresses the recording of various readings of recommended or desired physiological and other readings by the patient manually or by using devices that communicate with the invention platform for the patient and for the patient to share selected data with medical service providers. As can be understood by those of ordinary skill in the art, the same approach also works for non-medical recording of data and reporting.
By way of example only and not by limitation, Applicant has identified several benefits of the present invention's patient centric platform for patients as follows:
Benefits for a Patient:
                1) Patient builds and retains complete medical history and control of information        2) Patient gets a life time medical history depository with ease and accuracy of data        3) Patient has an easy to use environment that is available online—anywhere, on any device        4) Patient can submit her medical and personal data to selected recipients such as, for example only, her primary care provider online or via mobile device        5) Patient can collect specialty specific data prior to a visit and submit the data online or via mobile device        6) Patient can work on incomplete parts of the requested information at home or while waiting at medical facility        7) Patient has to enter data once or import data from any other platforms once and it remains available to use again and again for sharing with any other providers        8) Streamlines registration and check-in process at the front desk        9) Delights patients by reducing wait-time in front office—easy to register and check-inBenefits for the Healthcare Providers:        1) For patient authorized recipients of selected data the invention provides better tool to front desk staff—easy to admit/check-in patient, easy to see what data is missing and complete it on the spot, upload data into existing systems        2) Provides a better tool to back-office—automatically import that data from the invention in to EHR and no need to type/re-enter data manually        3) Have complete and accurate data while reducing data-entry time and errors        4) Improve staff efficiency and morale        5) Reduce cost of operations without investing in new servers        6) The invention is a fully secure platform, compliant with laws and regulations        7) Enabled by this invention to monitor patient data as “Medical Home” and reduction in hospital re-admission work flows develop in the organization        8) Enabled by this invention to support/participate in sensor based data gathering and services as adoption of such devices and applications become part of a practice        9) Move to 21st century interaction with medical office and patient and make the office visit experience match with patient expectations        10) The present invention does not replace existing EHR/PHR/PMS/HMS platforms but enhances the value of existing investment and extends utilization        11) Engages patient in managing healthcare data by providing them a reason to enter it once and use it oftenThe Methods        
By way of continued description, the present invention is understood by example in the medical arena to provide methods for a patient to request and setup an account with the invention platform (here “platform” is understood to include a computer system in the form of a programmable device configured to utilize a computer processor to process data as described more fully herein), the platform performing activation, completing authentication, verification and identification, presenting personal, general and specialty medical profiles status, recorded reading status, completing personal information consisting of demographics, payments and other information, entering medical history information consisting of immunization, medicine taken, family and social history and other information, entering medical review of systems such as cardiovascular, respiratory, etc., completing primary care data such as prior hospitalization, prior illness history etc., auto selecting right questions based on age and gender of the patient, and tracking percentage complete for each profile. Further, the platform enables continuing completion of information as and when needed for medical specialist specific data such as cardiology, surgery and all other specialties, entering purpose of visit and date of visit, and recording prior tests and, if available, entering or uploading test results. The present invention also provides a method to upload documents like a copy of the patient's—authorized user's—insurance card, identity card, like driver license, health directive proxy or living will. In addition, the invention provides methods for recording of data such as blood pressure, blood glucose level, blood oxygen level, body temperature, pulse rate, urine output volume etc. The present invention enables an authorized user to review the data, print the forms and share selected data with authorized recipients by means of a filtering matrix. This filtering matrix is based on criteria set by the recipient organization for each type of data, and there can be one or more such matrix filter for each organization or each department or service provider. To address the concern of filling out endless forms for each specialty and organization, the forms are removed from the data entry side. The present invention instead presents data requests in a series of questions for each different specialty and once a question is answered in one place, the same data, if requested in another place or form, is used in reading or printing various forms without the requirement of duplicate data entry by the patient. According to one aspect of the invention, a slider control presents data gathering in a series of question and answer modes, with a slider changing color, for example only and not by way of limitation, to show all (e.g. green slider) or only incomplete (e.g red slider) or some other filter based (e.g. orange slider for critical items) set of questions to gather data and improve user experience and data normalization.
Additionally the above described method for data recording may further include devices that reside with the patient and automatically generate readings and use various networking techniques to report the data to the invention platform. This may further include an optional local hub that aggregates data from one or more devices and one or more patients before reporting to the invention platform, thereby improving performance and localization.
On the medical service provider staff side, additional invention methods allow the authorized recipient user role to be defined based on job functions and/or expertise and provides tools to filter patients and organize work queues so as to help those with incomplete data to complete necessary information, receive the patient data and review, print, import or export information as needed, all only as authorized by the patient.
According to another aspect, the invention offers extra security to ensure that only an intended authorized recipient gets the data by providing for use of a token. When a patient sends the data to an authorized recipient healthcare provider, not only a notification—email or other message—goes to the authorized recipient but also a token is generated for the patient/sender, who can deliver that token to the healthcare provider over phone, via text message or in person at the time of visit. This also serves another benefit of protecting the healthcare provider against medical liability on the part of the recipient as by holding the data in a wait queue until patient visit time, and not having access to the data until the token is redeemed. This ensures that the healthcare providers are not assuming responsibility of treatment prior to a visit and avoids liability for any failure to treat or any complications that may occur prior to a visit.
Similarly with real time or near real time frequent recording of device based data, the invention platform offers a method to collect and hold data, and to generate filter based boundary conditions that may trigger an alert to a patient or a care provider or a healthcare professional based on the workflow method selected as will be described more fully hereafter.
In another aspect, the invention further allows a patient to share her full profile with any family member to co-manage their affairs or for a parent and/or guardian to manage data for another person using various profiles, thus making it a data repository for an entire family while at the same time, allowing the data owner to take away profile sharing as and when needed.
According to a further aspect of the invention, the method takes this patient-medical service provider approach to other industries where the “patient” is the consumer who by the present invention is enabled to manage personal data for financial, insurance, retail and other services and respective service providers that are authorized recipients of consumer provided data to offer service, where the consumer no longer has to fill-out forms for each service but only has to enter data in her specialty profile once in one place—her authorized user data repository—all as will be described more fully hereafter.
The above advantages, as well as many other advantages, of the present invention will be readily apparent to one skilled in the art to which the disclosure pertains from the reading of the claims, the appended drawings, and the following description.